Edited by Douglas Brinkley, with a forward by David Habersham, Fear and Loathing in America is the brilliant collection of letters written by Hunter S. Thompson and his acquaintances from the years of 1968-1976. This is the second collection of letters published in a novel, with the first being those in Proud Highway.
This novel is a valuable account of Thompson’s hardships as a writer, even after becoming a “celebrity.” These woes include constantly being broke, being screwed over in the name of money, dealing persistently with contracts and litigation, reading negative reviews on his work and/or being libeled in the press, and receiving threats from editors, lawyers, strangers, the IRS an even former friends.
It also is a testament to how seriously Hunter took everything he wrote, no matter how many cuss words or bits of sarcasm were thrown in. These letters reflect Hunter as a writer and a human being, and help to discern the man from the myth- both who were natural-born wordsmiths and relentless truth-seekers.
This novel also explores the persistent question of whether his classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was indeed a true account, or if it was mostly pure fiction.
Some of the events/topics/concepts found in this novel include:
What a Writer Needs to Survive, Oscar Acosta’s Rules of the Road, Brutality of 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, HST Meets Ralph Steadman, Instructions for Reading Gonzo, John Wayne the ‘Bigoted Pig’, More Accurate Tales of Drug Use, Meeting with Oil Companies, 1973 Resignation from ‘Rolling Stone’ but Still Writing, Disdain for East Coast, Letters to Juan, Disappearance of Oscar Acosta, Times at Jerome Hotel Bar & Pool, Not Living Past Age 27, Novelistic Journalism to the Journalistic Novel
Here, I’m going to provide numerous quotes from the book that I feel help to explore Thompson’s persona and mindset during this period.
Because the book was rather long, I’ve divided the quotations into different sections (see below). In this review you’ll find quotes from the book’s introduction.
From the book’s introduction:
“Gentleman, nature works in mysterious ways. When a new truth comes upon the earth, or a great idea necessary for mankind is born, where does it come from? Not from the police force or the prosecuting attorneys or the judges or the lawyers or the doctors; not there. It comes from the despised and the out-cast; it comes perhaps from jails and prisons; it comes from men who have dared to be rebels and think their thoughts; and their fate has been the fate of rebels. This generation gives them graves while another builds them monuments; and there is no exception to it. It has been true since the world began, and it will be true no doubt forever.” – Clarence Darrow, 1920
“Experimentation- and overindulgence- in drugs such as mescaline, hashish, and LSD are also commonplace occurrences in these letters. For a while, in fact, Thompson considered titling this book Confessions of a Mescaline Eater or The Jimson Weed Chronicles, in tribute to narcotics enthusiasts Thomas DeQuincey and William S. Burroughs.” – Douglas Brinkley
Book Introduction from HST:
“These letters are not the work of a wise man, but only a player and a scribe with a dangerous gambling habit…That is a risky mix that will sooner or later lead you to cross the wrong wires and get shocked, or even burned to a cinder. On some days you will be lucky and only break your fingers and make a fool of yourself. But luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it…The real keys are timing, and balance, and the learned ability to know a hot wire when you see one…People who count on luck don’t last long in the business of defusing bombs and disarming land mines, and that is what my business seems to be…The period covered in these letters was like riding on top of a bullet train for eight years with no sleep and no wires to hang on to.”
“I came to know gunfire and panic and the sight of my own blood on the streets. I knew every airport in the country before they had metal-detectors and you could still smoke on planes. Pilots knew me by name and stewardesses took me home when my flights were grounded by snow. I made many new friends and many powerful enemies from coast to coast. I went without sleep for seventy or eighty hours at a time and often wrote five thousand words in one sitting. It was a brutal life, and I loved it.”
“Bob Dylan was the original hippy, and anyone curious about the style and tone of the ‘younger generation’s’ thinking in the early 1960s has only to play his albums in chronological order…His lyrics became increasingly drug-oriented, with double-entendres and duel meanings that were more and more obvious, until his ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35′ was banned by radio stations from coast to coast…By 1965 he had changed his last name to Dylan and was wearing shoulder-length hair and rubber-tight, pin-stripe suits that reflected the colorful and sarcastically bisexual image that was, even then, becoming the universal style of a sub-culture called ‘hippies.’”
“I remember a constant excitement about something happening, but only the fake priests and dingos called it the wave of the future. The excitement, for that matter, was all done in by the time the big-league press got hold of those “hippy” spokesmen and guru caricatures like Tim Leary and the press-conference Diggers… The Haight-Ashbury had become a commercial freak show and everybody on the street was selling either sandals or hamburgers or dope. The whole area was controlled by ‘hippy businessmen’ who wore beards and beads to disguise the sad fact that they were actually carbon copies of the bourgeois merchant fathers whom they’d spent so much time and wrath rejecting.”
“Not even the people who think all hippies should be put in jail or sent to the front-lines in Vietnam will quarrel with what is usually accepted as the Hippy Ethic- Peace, Love and Every Man for Himself in a Free-Wheeling Orgy of Live and Let Live.”
Quotes from the Novel on Drugs
Quotes from the Novel on Writing/Journalism
Quotes from the Novel on American Dream/Fear & Loathing
Quotes from the Novel on Society/Politics
Quotes from the Novel: Random/Personal